Let me first say that my latest cattle call for interview subjects has been an overwhelming success, which I will write about later. One of the people who responded directed me to the Harvard Sports Analysis Collective website. Per the website:

This club is for those who are interested in sports of all types and sports analysis from a quantitative standpoint. We use mathematical and statistical models and techniques to investigate a wide variety of topics from refining and developing strategies in specific situations and predicting outcomes of games to analyzing team decisions and looking for inefficiencies in the betting market. A background in statistics and mathematics as well as a working knowledge of sports is helpful, but certainly not necessary, as we will teach all the math that is used.

This existence of this organization has many implications for my research and I thought that I’d just ruminate about them here.

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Finding people to interview is proving a bit more difficult that I had anticipated. Mostly because, I’m in cold calling mode where I just email people that I know and ask them if they want to be interviewed and then ask them if they know anyone who might be interested in interviewing. I have about five interviews scheduled. The problem is that most of the people that I have scheduled are part of the key informants group. Most of the interviews that I want to do will be the rank and file sabermetricians, people who do not do sabermetrics for a living. I have two interviews scheduled. I don’t think I can reveal their names as I’m pretty sure that violates the confidentiality part of the human subjects research protocol described in the last post.

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